How New York built the largest stock of public housing in America — and how the building stopped. 1935–2010, in five charts.
WhenJuly 2026
WhereNew York City
WhatConstruction waves, tower heights, superblock footprints, building scale, and per-room costs, from NYCHA's development data book.
MethodEra pivots over NYCHA's Development Data Book (346 developments, January 2025 vintage), plus development-level OLS regressions of building height on completion year.
NYCHA opened First Houses on the Lower East Side in 1935. Over the next seventy years it built 183,000 apartments in 346 developments — more public housing than the rest of the country's authorities combined.
The data tells a simple story. For thirty-five years everything grew: the towers, the superblocks, the buildings themselves. After 1970, everything reversed.
Developments
346
Apartments
183,141
Residential buildings
2,465
Built 1945–1965
63%
NYCHA towers against the Midtown skyline, Brooklyn.
Apartments completed per half-decade
Two waves: a New Deal ramp-up, then the great postwar boom. Nearly two-thirds of everything NYCHA ever built opened between 1945 and 1965.
The tower rose, then fell
Each dot is one new-construction development (n = 235) — hover for its name. Lines are least-squares fits, before and after 1970; bands are 95% confidence intervals.
The tower in the park, as built. Brooklyn.
Marlboro Houses, Gravesend — six stories, cherry trees.
The shrinking superblock
Average land per development, and the slice of it covered by buildings. The 18-acre tower-in-the-park site of the 1950s gave way to infill under 2 acres.
Apartments per building
Buildings themselves scaled up into the late 1960s, then shrank to walk-up size. Eras after 2000 average a single development each.
Construction cost per rental room
Average development cost per rental room, in nominal dollars — a 30× climb from First Houses to the last conventional builds.
Eleanor Roosevelt Houses, Brooklyn.
Robert S. Fulton Houses, Chelsea.
Source: NYCHA Development Data Book, January 2025 vintage, pivoted by completion era. "New construction" excludes rehabs and acquisitions. Later eras thin out: after 1995 NYCHA completed only a handful of developments, so era averages there reflect one or two projects. Costs are nominal (not inflation-adjusted). Preliminary analysis — a fuller write-up is coming.